Augmented Reality for Wifi Hotspots

If you're a road warrior or just someone who's out of the office occasionally, there are times when you need to connect your laptop to the Internet.

Locating a Wi-Fi connection can be a challenge because it's difficult to find places that offer Wi-Fi and get information about what those places are like such as whether they serve good coffee and food, and whether there are enough places to sit.

Fortunately, there are a growing number of tools and services that are making it easier - and more interesting - to find places offering Wi-Fi.

One of the most intriguing is Worksnug, which is creating technology that uses augmented reality to "find the nearest and best places to work".

Although Worksnug has yet to launch, a video on its Web site shows how you can use an iPhone app and the iPhone's camera to scan a particular location. As you scan, information about places with Wi-Fi appears on the screen. If the service works as well as Worksnug suggests, it would be truly innovative and cool.

Worksnug is slated to launch in London and San Francisco before expanding to other places around the world. Unfortunately, Toronto isn't on Worksnug's priority list but you never know what a little lobbying might do!

To see a demo of Worksnug, check out this video.

My Social Media New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year. Here are my five Social Media New Year's Resolutions for 2008:

1) Master Twitter. I tried Twitter several months ago, but didn't get much out of it. But everybody is still talking about it (everybody, at least, in the social media marketing bubble). Maybe I wasn't using it right. Used properly, they say, it's more than a "What am I doing tool" and more of a "What am I thinking" tool with great potential for business networking and personal branding. Jaiku is said to be the better microblogging tool, but Twitter is where the people are, and in this world, the size of the social graph is most of what counts.

2) Live a Second Life. With a new job, a social media practice to build and two small kids, I haven't found the time needed to invest in Second Life. But I know I need to spend some time there. Second Life is no longer quite as "hot" as it was a year or so ago. (More than one person has quipped that the fact that Canada Post is now there means the Second Life phenomenon is over). But virtual worlds are here to stay, and hugely relevant for marketers. If Second Life isn't the killer world, somebody will come along and invent a better one.

3) Communitize. I know that's not a word. But in addition to writing my own blog, I will be more active in commenting on other blogs and podcasts.

4) Get Veritas more plugged in. Most of my Veritas colleagues are on Facebook. A few are regulars at Third Tuesday gatherings. Most of them read blogs and some of them even write them. But I'd like to help my colleagues get more tapped into the social media tools that have made me smarter and more productive in this new world. Tools like Google Reader and Del.icio.us. And if I master Twitter, maybe they will too.

5) Get myself less plugged in. The future of social networking isn't on computers, but on wireless devices. I need to use these tools less often on my laptop and more often on my Blackberry.

So those are mine. What am I missing? And more importantly, what are your Social Media resolutions?